Lubomír Dudáček

"And my son gave me the address of the mother, who coincidentally lived in Ondříčková Street. And I lived around the corner. Ondříčkova 28. White tiled house. A tall, corpulent lady came to open for me, I thought that she could be seventy-seventy-five years old at the time. She invited me for coffee, people weren't afraid to invite anyone home yet. I sat down and said what the purpose of my visit was. She began to cry that someone had remembered her husband and the diploma. She opened a heavy closet, wooden, carved, and a Persian black fur coat, I see it to this day, and pulled the diploma, the original, from its sleeve. I said, 'Mrs Kanclíř, you surprise me terribly, and could I come with a colleague to take a picture of it?' She told me, 'Look, you made me happy that you remembered my husband and the diploma, you have it here and do what you want with it.' I told her,' You can count on me to protect it like an eye in my head. And that the diploma will not fall into the wrong hands."

"So, suddenly they said there would be a train from Burgas to Yugoslavia. We got on the train to Yugoslavia, they packed lots of food for us. We had some bandages, just everything we needed because no one knew how we would end up. We arrived in Yugoslavia, via Nis. There were mainly Czechs in the train, I don't think I'm wrong, it was two wagons full of Czechs, only Czechs. And they were then transferred in Niš to another train that went to Belgrade. But we stopped in Svetozarevo, that was, I dare to say, about a hundred kilometers from the border with Bulgaria. There the train stopped, Yugoslavs, Serbs were waiting, and they took us into families. We came to the family of Dušan Dimitrijevič, and he was a partisan during the World War II, he had two sons and a wife, of course. They took us in because they liked children, they also had children about the same age as us, they saw our boy. We were there for about ten days. It was organized by the Yugoslavs. No matter what people say, they really wanted to be friends. And they took care of us as their own family. When there was a chance and when the situation in the republic calmed down, we were loaded onto a train and the train continued to Vienna."